Brandon Donnelly

Daily insights for city builders, delivered every morning at 6 AM ET. I’m Brandon Donnelly — a Toronto-based real estate developer and founder of Globizen. I’ve been writing here since 2013.

Subscribe

Tag: tiny home

  • Hong Kong needs bigger apartments

    CityLab recently published this article about “why Hong Kong is building apartments the size of parking spaces.” It’s about the city’s “microflats” which are typically in the range of 150 to 300 square feet. Supposedly there about 8,500 of these apartments across Hong Kong and in 2019 (this was apparently peak microflat) they represented about 7% of all new residential construction.

    Hong Kong is one of the densest and most supply constrained real estate markets on the planet. And so there are very good reasons for these affordability pressures and the push toward smaller apartments. The article gets into a number of them. The concern I have is that the article also seems to blame developers for a number of these problems, without a clear understanding of the economics behind new construction.

    It is not enough to simply say that developers need to be less greedy and build bigger apartments. If a 250 sf apartment currently costs $1 million and you think it should be twice as big, then the price is now also going to be somewhere around twice as big. Is the answer more $2 million apartments? Developers trade in space and more space costs more money to build.

    All of this is not to say that housing affordability isn’t a problem worth addressing. It of course is. I am simply saying that there is a cost structure behind every new development that is driving decision making and driving what ultimately gets built. Understanding it can be helpful when looking for solutions. Believe it or not, not all developers are bad. Some actually want to help build beautiful, sustainable, and prosperous cities.

  • Boiler room turned guest apartment

    Click here if you can’t see the embedded video above.

    This is a 93 square foot former boiler room that was transformed by San Francisco-based architect Christi Azevedo into a full service guest apartment. The ground floor only measures 8’2″ x 11’6″ and so a taller volume was created to house a separate sleeping area and bathroom above. Designing small spaces forces you to be creative and consider each element carefully. This tiny home is a good example of that.

  • Tiny, prefabricated, and expensive

    This is not a new video (click here if you can’t see it embedded above). It’s from 2015. But I still very much like the simplicity of the Vipp Shelter. It’s only 55 square meters.

    One problem is that it cost USD 585,000 at the time it was prefabricated. It goes to show you that prefabrication and small don’t necessarily equate to affordability. For this reason, Lloyd Alter called it a “problematic prefab” back in 2015.

    Of course, there are ways to make a home like this much more cost effective. I’ve been looking, on and off, for over a year for a piece of land that would be suitable for a project like this. I’ll let you all know if I find something.